The Functional Art: An Introduction To Information Graphics And Visualization / quote 13 of 18
Visualization as functional art
individual information graphics are also technologies, means to fulfill purposes, devices whose aim is to help an audience complete certain tasks. This apparent no-brainer will have consequences later on. If you accept that a visualization is, above all, a tool, you are implicitly accepting that the discipline it belongs to is not just art, but functional art, something that achieves beauty not through the subjective, freely wandering self-expression of the painter or sculptor, but through the careful and restrained tinkering of the engineer.